Museum DKM

BLINKY PALERMO | Graphic Works | 13.07.2012 27.05.2013

Non-Objective Sensations
On Palermo's Graphic Works
Of all the artists working in the 1960s and 1970s, almost none created so little "minimalist" art with
such minimal means as Blinky Palermo sparkling, dynamic and with an immediate, sensual effect,
completely devoid of an absolute validation or theoretically grounded system. In his graphic works,
Palermo seized on the mediums possibilities for clearer, more distinctive shapes and incisive colors,
which as opposed to drawing or painting could be put to paper as a whole and in one go. Silkscreen, in particular, allowed him to create uniform and distinct color shapes that do not "spread"
across the paper like lines or traces of paint, but above all "stand" in front of the viewer. Despite this
simplicity and straightforwardness, these shapes never seem rigid, but rather come across as spontaneous, surprising, very instant and alive. There is always something irritating and inexplicable about
the elementary in his work, something that eliminates any semblance of solidification.

In 1964, when 21-year-old painting student Peter Heisterkamp joined Beuys class at the art academy
in Dsseldorf and assumed the name "Palermo", his painting style changed radically. Organic, flowing
expressive movements and figurative allusions in muted tones were replaced with just a few succinct,
usually rectilinear shapes, often rendered in glowing color. The inspiration for this new style becomes
especially apparent in his "Composition with Eight Red Rectangles", which was also made in 1964: it
is the elemental, non-objective art of Russian painter Kasimir Malevich (18781935) and his1915
"Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles" that delivered the starting point for Palermos composi1

tion. Malevich did not develop his radical ordering of simple, geometric color surfaces by abstracting
objects; instead he created primary, basic shapes that capture the eye as a whole. Depending on their
2

dimensions, position and optical movement, they stir a different non-objective sensation in the viewer.

This succinct, rigorous expression of mental energies made a tremendous impression on Palermo and
his fellow student Imi Knoebel. In late 1957, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam acquired 29 Malevich
paintings; in 1964 Palermo traveled to Amsterdam, and found in Malevichs austerity a way out of the
subjective seismographs of the informal and lyrical light visions of ZERO. Palermo saw a new "stand3

ard" in Malevichs "Square", and as Knoebel said of his encounter with the Russian movement
around Malevich" in those years, "The black square fascinated us. We were completely taken in by the
phenomenon; that was the real turning point. "

1 Palermo's picture (works cat. Moeller No. 16) is currently on loan at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. For more on Palermo Malevich, see Bernhart Schwenk, "Konstruktion
Utopie. Palermo und die klassische Avantgarde", in: Blinky Palermo. Eine Tagung im Hessischen Landesmuseum Darmstadt 18/19 March 2006, Darmstadt 2006, pp. 50-57.
2 For Malevich, the black square was "the direct representation" of "non-objective sensation", the white background embodied the "nothingness" beyond this sensation.
Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (Dessau 1927), republished New York 2003 (Dover), p. 68.
3 Gislind Nabakowski, "Grn/wie ich dich liebe/Grn" in: Erich Franz (concept), Palermo. Who knows the beginning and who knows the end? exh. cat. LWL State
Museum of Art and Cultural History Mnster, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Heidelberg and Berlin 2011, p. 36.
4 Johannes Stttgen, from "der ganze Riemen" IMI & IMI 19641969 (conversation with W. Knoebel, Jan. 6, 1982), in: Imi Knoebel, exh. cat. Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven 1982, p. 96.

Stiftung DKM | Duisburg (DE)

Museum DKM

In his first Objects (1964 and after), Palermo positioned these basic shapes not on a painted background but as sculpture-like painted forms in front of the white wall, giving them an immediate presence. Rather than follow something happening in the painting or a composition within the picture, the
viewer it in at once. At the same time, he or she also takes in certain striking features that attack and
completely transform this basic perception: color dissolves, the form shows disturbances in its fixed
contours or almost extends into a line. The striking first impression of the painting, its effect as a
whole, lapses into a moment of perception in motion and becomes something entirely different all together: fluid transparency, aligned gradients or fragmentary openness. Even the shape of a triangle
5

breaks with the static, fixed solidity of its horizontals and verticals. Joseph Beuys was surely behind
these impulses toward pervasive dynamization, though Palermo produced them on pictorial planes.
Colored zones dissolve the object-like forms with their optical intensity particularly in the fabric
6

paintings (starting 1966), which are made of colorful, sewn-together fabric panels. Mark Rothko and
Barnett Newman in particular were also especially important reference points for Palermo when it
came to this kind of pervasive dynamization of seeing.

In 1966, Palermo attempted to translate the gouache showing a blue triangle on white paper into a
printed graphic. The rigid, hieratic basic shape of a standing triangle was combined with soft brush
strokes and imprecise contours that violate the straight boundaries. Actually, this visible application of
paint did not combine with the basic triangle shape, but contradict it: it creates a different perception.
Once again, the glowing and "deep" ultramarine blue provokes a readjustment of the gaze. Palermo
saw this first graphic work as a failure and did not release it for printing beyond a few test prints. The
thing that bothered him about it becomes clear in the identical triangle motif from the 1970 "4 Prototypes" portfolio: the blue surface is now completely homogenous and no longer reproduces the
brushstrokes; instead it glows with a uniformity that is only possible with screen printing. At the same
time, the idea of fluid movements countermanding the rigid geometry is triggered as well: through the
irregular edges. The contrast between the two types of perception appears even more evident: the
uniform blue makes the "imprecise" limiting of paint application especially palpable.
These visual adjustments also set the other motifs in "4 Prototypes" in motion. The light green, asymmetrical triangle in light green shifts, as it were, into an unstable state. The grey, disc combines compact, sculptural cohesion, incorporeal flatness and a hesitant linear contour or actually opposes the
8

two. (Palermo even saw the expression of "freedom" in this "free form". ) And the black square draws
on Malevichs example on such a small dimension that the white of the paper becomes equally im-

5
6
7
8

See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "The Palermo Triangles", in: Lynne Cooke et al. (eds.), Blinky Palermo Retrospective 19641977, exh. cat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art et al. (traveling exh.), New York 2011, p. 2543. Buchloh has a strong tendency to isolate Papermos formal antecedents as semantic, iconographic and
symbolic signs.
For more on Palermos references to Beuys and Newman, see Erich Franz, Palermo Freiheit des Sehens, in: Franz 2011 op. cit. 3), p. 21 f.
Fred Jahn, Foreword and works cat. no. 1, in: Gesamte Grafik und Auflagenobjekte 1966-1975, Munich 1983, reprinted in: Klaus Werner (ed.), Blinky Palermo, exh.
cat. Leipziger Galerie fr Zeitgenssische Kunst 1993, p. 144, 146.
Franz 2011 (op cit. 6), p. 22.

Stiftung DKM | Duisburg (DE)

Museum DKM

portant, both stand in a field of tension between concentration and expansiveness. Looking at the four
prints together, the erratic differences between them are even more palpable.

This jumping-back-and-forth of the gaze becomes even more pronounced in the "Flipper" diptych,
where the various perceptions give way to a kind of visual flickering. The red squares on a white
background alternate from the right page back to the left as though framed by imaginary lines. Vice
versa, the red in-between spaces between the blue lines dissolve as positive forms and move forwards and backwards in space. The eye switches between the individual shapes and the grid as a
whole. The visible cannot be pinned down: imaginary movements completely transform what appears
to be simple. The purity of color goes further to enhance the speed of comprehension. In other words,
the slagless clarity of screenprint becomes an important precondition for the sudden and drastic optical metamorphoses. Where "4 Prototypes" shows Palermos dealings with Malevich, setting his geometric shapes in motion, a similar dynamization can clearly be seen in "Flipper", this time in the classic
style of Mondrian.

In the "Staircase" screenprint, a band of color zig-zags from one corner of the paper to another, becoming a spatial, spiraling progression. Here, too, a rigid shape gives way to a dynamic experience.

Some of Palermos graphics assume arrangements from drawings or color fields applied directly on
the wall, and can therefore incorporate recollections of these not entirely preserved works. Still, the
changing visual perspectives also emerge from purely graphical impressions. Palermo's 1968 wall
drawings at the Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich framed sections of the white gallery walls with
closed or open linear boundaries which are always followed by an arrangement of two squares, one
above the other. They occupy every room in the gallery and partition the white of these walls into different fields, in-between spaces and marginal zones. The same is true of the lines in the 12-part
graphic series, which likewise alter the white of the paper: the (more or less) enclosed field becomes a
positive form "in front of" or "in" the surrounding background before lapsing into it again after all. It is
as though the line had the power to alter the empty surface altogether.

With the screen print "T", visible comprehension "jumps" several times from one perception to another:
the rigid, opaque olive-green color is superimposed over the black area, which is painted in with a soft
brush. The "T" shape turns to fluid, a drop of which "flows out of" the center. The image unpacks itself
in layers: the black under the olive, the white under the black. At the same time, an almost geometric
division emerges in three stripes and two halves, and again a soft, painterly application of color on
paper.

Stiftung DKM | Duisburg (DE)

Museum DKM

Likewise, the "Olive/Silver" screenprint builds a tension out of the conflict between the spontaneous/painterly and geometric construction. "Hasty" brushstrokes create geometric partitions: a silvergrey triangle on the right, for example, a olive-green triangle with a diagonal dividing line, but also
olive-green triangles or stripes. Every negative, residual area reverses into a positive form. Quick
movement and indefinite allusions give way to an experience of all-pervasive fleetingness.
What we see is not fixed; it is fugitive transformation through and through. The work is not a closed
body where his message forms within it, but it develops out of the tensions and adjustments in ones
own optical sense. Palermo often works with the tension between big and small, from a large, real
surface (the wall or the sheet of paper) that is part of the work, to a very small, optical concentration
that focuses energies and attentions. In his "Miniatures", we detect something both positive and something negative in little embossed areas in the middle of the rag paper surface: movement and fixedness. These elements feel very definite and yet completely incomprehensible at the same time.
9

Palermo almost never said anything about his work, even refused any interpretation. In a 1968 statement he writes that he has translated visual and material reality into aesthetic norms" and even
10

speaks of a "new vision and expanded consciouness."

In his one, brief interview (with Gislind

Nabakowski), he speaks of "expression painting"; in response to the question "How should the viewer
look at these paintings? " he goes back to the definitive experiences of seeing. For him, it is about the
sensations inherent in the act of seeing: "seeing the qualities of surfaces, form and color. When Im
looking at the surface of water, I of course have other sensations than I do when Im looking at a blue
color field. Once I have reached this potential in a painting, I consider it finished."

11

Erich Franz

9 Cf. ibid., p. 22 f.
10 Ibid., p. 23.
11 Gislind Nabakowski, "Palermo", in: heute Kunst, 2, July/August 1973, p. 6.

Museum DKM | Stiftung DKM

Stiftung DKM | Duisburg (DE)